[OLPC-devel] Re: LinuxBIOS update status

[Jim Gettys]

David,

The attached sounds like the cause of BIOS freakout problem....  You may
not have waded through to this mail yet....
                                - Jim


On Tue, 2006-08-22 at 12:19 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 22:13 -0400, Ivan Krstić wrote:
> > Hey folks,
> > 
> > I just poked around a bit; we're currently blocking on a couple of
> > things before we can release instructions for upgrading to LinuxBIOS.
> > 
> > - OLPC Fedora build 59, marked 'last stable', doesn't contain fbdev and
> > the requisite bits that LinuxBIOS is counting on, so we need a more
> > recent stable build to actually upgrade.
> 
> We don't mark builds as stable until we're happy with them. 
> 
> This includes booting off the targets we want to support
> 
>  - USB image @ devboard with Insyde BIOS
>  - NAND image @ devboard with Insyde BIOS, booting via USB and kexec'ing
>    into a kernel loaded from NAND (select OLPC NAND in grub on the USB
>    stick)
>  - qemu image
> 
> now our criterion also includes 
> 
>  - USB image for devboard with LinuxBIOS
> 
> and at some point it will include
> 
>  - NAND flash image for devboard with LinuxBIOS
> 
> 
> > - David, can you brief us on where your machine currently stands? If I
> > understand correctly, you've successfully flashed it with LinuxBIOS, but
> > don't have it giving a usable VGA signal (is it expecting the DCON to be
> >  there?), so you can only use it through ssh. Is this accurate? How long
> > will this take to fix?
> 
> I was able to follow the instructions on the Wiki and have had no
> VGA/DCON signals except with a ROM sent to me by Jordan. I haven't tried
> since Friday though.
> 
> The blocker right now is that the BIOS freaks out when trying to boot
> USB. It mounts the image but when the linuxrc script (or one of it child
> scripts) run /usr/bin/[ busybox says "Memory Exhausted". I've tried to
> work on this but got nowhere - it's not really my area of expertise. So
> I'm kinda waiting for that to get fixed. It's block marking a build as
> stable...
> 
> However.. it does work... the BIOS, after freaking out, will drop you to
> a shell on the UART and you can then manually do the following
> ". /key/boot/olpc-boot.sh" and we boot just fine. This works IIRC with
> build72 or build73. The images needs some fixing as to choose the right
> X driver (we just use fbdev(4) which works with both vesafb and gxfb)
> but by and large we start X and things work.
> 
>     David
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Devel mailing list
> Devel at laptop.org
> http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
-- 
Jim Gettys
One Laptop Per Child

-------------- next part --------------
An embedded message was scrubbed...
From: Mitch Bradley <wmb at firmworks.com>
Subject: Re: linuxbios/image problems
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 02:28:34 -0700
Size: 2872
URL: <http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20060822/3aa2f5a0/attachment.mht>